Summary

A program can execute the INSERT, DELETE, and UPDATE statements, as Modify data describes. A program can also scan through a table with a cursor, updating or deleting selected rows. It can also use a cursor to insert rows, with the benefit that the rows are buffered and sent to the database server in blocks.

In all these activities, you must make sure that the program detects errors and returns the database to a known state when an error occurs. The most important tool for doing this is transaction logging. Without transaction logging, it is more difficult to write programs that can recover from errors.